Abstract
Natural resources such as fish are vital for improving human livelihood and serving as sources of food, income and employment opportunities in Ethiopia. But, its degradation and overexploitation lead to anxiety about the living standards of human beings and other living things. The degradation of these resources, which is caused by the less common participation of all stakeholders in protecting the resources, is the most challenging issue in the country. The objective of this paper is to review fishery production and management and their challenges, the extent of the overexploitation of natural resources, the contributions of collective action in fishery production and management, and fishery collective action challenges in Ethiopia. The review paper identified that the existence of a lack of strong coordination among different actors like local communities, the government, development agents, research centers and donor organizations whose concern are with the fishery sector caused the degradation of water bodies and fishery resources in Ethiopia. These issues resulted in challenges in fishery resource production and management, mismanagement in solving social differences among local communities, and low cooperation among communities in protecting fish resources. Besides, these challenges also caused a limited expansion of fishery collective action, overexploitation of fishery resources, and less concern for the protection of fish diversity species in the country. Therefore, essential policy implications forwarded are creating and improving joint collaboration between fish users, local communities, government institutions and development agents; organizing and empowering the local communities in collective action to involve them in the fishery sector to contribute to practical improvements in the protection, production, management and sustainability of fish resources.
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1 Introduction
Natural resources and their common property rights are highly interlinked and the governance, appropriation, and maintenance of the resource and its interdependence need the involvement of local community, national and international actors [1, 2]. However, its use property rights are influenced by the behaviors of the users and collectively shared social cooperation such as trust, reciprocity, reputation, leadership, sanction, social networks and law enforcement [1, 3, 4]. Common pool resources are natural or man-made resources that are rival and non-excludable and are mostly used simultaneously by members of a community [5,6,7]. These resources face management problem complexity caused by the nature of the communities, like heterogeneity or homogeneity [8]. Common pool resources provide substantial benefits for human beings and others but their inherent problems are beyond the estimated by literatures especially in developing countries like Ethiopia. By its nature, protection and management of these resources require a comprehensive role of all stakeholders rather than a single or a few members. Overall, the participation of the communities around the resources more than any other stakeholders plays a significant role in keeping the resource for current and future generations.
In Ethiopia, too, common pool resources are serving in improving the livelihood of greater proportion of the societies. However, the resource is being damaged due to lack of social awareness and management to protect the resource [9]. The community composed of diversified social classes if not used as opportunity, they could fail to agree on when, how much and how to use the resource. When these differences occurred, the community could also be unable to jointly organize themselves in group to participate in the protection of the resource. Such challenges create mistrust in between all users and participants of the resource. In addition, these resources are limited in its nature and absence of strict rule set on the users of the resources and lack of regular monitoring hamper the sustainability of the resource.
Fisheries are common pool resources that are complex and interdependent ecological and social systems [10]. The sector contributes a lion's share to enhancing export competitiveness, food security, employment opportunities, income generation, poverty reduction and contributes to the overall socioeconomic development of least-developed countries such as Ethiopia, where its consumption is higher than its production [11,12,13,14,15,16]. However, management of fishery resources is extremely exposed to tragedy of the commons, lack of control for use restrictions, environmental instability, degradation of water bodies, and overexploitation [17,18,19,20,21]. Ethiopia is endowed with an abundance of water bodies such as lakes, rivers, streams, wetlands and man-made reservoirs that are comfortable for the production of different species of fish. But, the contributions of the sector to the development of the country are too low. Fish production faces complex challenges attributed to the types and nature of its species, lack of infrastructures, markets, technologies and attitudes of both producers and consumers. Moreover, lack of coordination between different actors in the sector, such as producers, traders, the government, institutions like NGOs, and consumers, also contributed to low fish production and productivity in the country. By comparing the contributions of fishery production to the livelihood of agrarian communities and its severe challenges, low efforts are being applied to minimize its issues and improve the benefits from the sector in developing countries like Ethiopia. Similarly, the weakness of property rights over the use of the resource and absence of controlling environmental impacts also fired fishery resource challenges.
In Ethiopia, a variety of fish species exist, and diversified ranges of ichthyofaunalakes are found in the rivers and reservoirs, though estimating the exact number of species is difficult [22]. But approximately, over 200 species of fish exist in lakes, rivers, and reservoirs throughout the country, where larger proportions of these species are native. These species are found in various water bodies, such as Wabishebele-Genale, Abay, Omo-Gibe, Awash, Rift valley lakes, and Baro Akobo basins. Among fish species living in these water bodies, 23 species from Abay, 7 species from Rift Valley, 6 species from Awash, 2 species from Omo, and 1 species from Baro are endemic [23, 24]. Similarly, lakes and reservoirs such as Fincha, Hawassa, Tana, Turkana, Chamo, Ziway, Koka, Abaya, Langano, South Wollo lakes Hayq, Ardibo, and various rivers are serving as a home for a greater proportion of fish supply for different users [25, 26]. The water bodies have a total surface area of 13,637 km2, with the annual potential to produce 94,541 tons of fish in the country. However, the total actual fish production is extremely below the potential capacity of fish production in the country [25]. [23] also pointed out that the fish production quantity has improved in Ethiopia, but the overall amount of its production is below the expected level and falls behind at the standard level.
Restriction and regulation policies in the use and access of natural resources profoundly endure the sustainability of the resources [27]. However, intensive competition for natural resources causes degradation and increases greenhouse gas emissions, which are significant challenges to fishery production [28]. But efficient production and productivity of fisheries need effective management, conservation of freshwater and water bodies, land use and investing in rehabilitating of degraded land [29,30,31]. These issues call for the importance of organizing community members in collective action for the improvement of fishery resources. According to [32], collective action in resource management happens when a group of people work together to achieve some common objectives aimed at solving resource management problems. People engage in collective action to use natural resources, fulfill basic needs, use a common facility for marketing their products, and meet to decide on rules-related actions in the member [33]. Fishery resource management requires effective and well-organized collective actions [34], while including all members of the community and isolated groups in fishery collective action depending on their interests profoundly builds a base for fostering co-management of fishery resources [35]. Therefore, natural resources such as fisheries need continuous management and monitoring through forwarding rules and regulations for resource use, protection, and reproduction. To achieve this, collective action has powerful positive impacts and plays a central role in addressing fish management issues and imposing reasonable rules to sustain the continuity of the resources and their upcoming benefits for future generations.
The sustainability of collective action, including its emergence, contributions to fishery resource management, success and failure, and expected outcome, are determined by social norms [36]. When social norms have good attributes, they have a positive impact on developing collective action for fishery resource management through creating a conducive environment for the resource, including and excluding methods, strengthening institutional capacity, solving its use conflicts, reducing environmental impacts and enforcing use law. In Ethiopia, a lot of studies were undertaken on the role of collective action in natural resource management, such as grazing land, forest coffee, forest resources, rangeland resources, soil and water conservation, and irrigation system management [27, 37,38,39,40,41,42]. However, studies conducted specifically considering the contributions of collective action in fishery resource management and its challenges were scant in the country. But, far away from collective action, [43] studied the role of social norms in natural resource management, while [44] discussed the impact of the attitudes of fish users on its management. These studies failed to consider the role of collective action in the effective management of natural resources by involving and identifying the interests of the collective members, their motivation for resource protection and management, the heterogeneity of the community, and lessening the conflict between members over resource use and access.
This review study is highly motivated by collective action in fishery resource management and its challenges in Ethiopia. The country is facing fishery production challenges and underutilizing of the sector caused by a lack of well-organized fishery collective action for its proper management. Management of natural resources such as fish needs the joint action and common objectives of collective actors against their individual interests, which cannot be realized by the specific traits and characteristics of the communities. The successful sustainability of fishery production directly or indirectly relies on the efforts of all stakeholders, such as users, local communities, government, NGOs, and their interdependent institutions. Therefore, this review paper on collective action in fishery resource management and its existing challenges is undertaken to fill the research gaps in the sector. It also adds valuable awareness for all stakeholders in the fishery sectors, such as users, local communities, government and NGOs, to jointly protect the resource and implement fishery production policies for tackling the complex problems of the sector, and it also provides clear insights for the readers and researchers.
2 Collective action and fishery resource management
2.1 Collective action drivers of fishery
Good monitoring and sanctioning mechanisms, strong leadership and the economic heterogeneity of actors contributes to the success of collective action management [45]. Besides, environmental, economic and social factors are pillars of fishery production sustainability and more firmly embedded in its management [46]. Similarly, [47] explained that addressed resource tenure, resolved conflict, discussed dialogue on equitable resource use, negotiation on resource access and use are the central elements collective action strength. As drivers, empowerment of communities through community-based management, adaptive capacity building and encouraging institutions facilitate its production, protection and management. Moreover, the cooperation of internal or self-organized, externally initiated and facilitated collective actors are a key for management of natural resources [48, 49]. But, the effectiveness of actors in fishery production depends on to a large extent of collective involvement of the community and ownership of the system by the resource users [13].
2.2 Collective action and its importance for fishery resource management
Collective action is a condition for individual strategy for achieving a common goal by accepting constraints along each activity undertaken by the community [50]. It uses social norms as a central element and essential criterion for managing and conserving overexploited fishery resources [51]. It favors the protection and rehabilitation of the resources that were overextracted and resulted in the collapse of fish stocks, the threatened food and livelihood of people who are dependent on them [52]. Stakeholders acting to improve the quality of fish products, strengthen the fisher group and capacity of the government, expand its product and marketing are the base for its management in Ethiopia [53]. Involvement of collective stakeholders in fishery management through the planning of short-, medium-, and long-term production and development plans are the way in which technology adoption, production seed and productivity of fish are improved in Ethiopia [54].
Collective action creates a conducive environment for fisheries through recovering from disaster, minimizing conflict, training youth with appropriate capacity, enabling the government to participate in fisheries, and finding markets for fisheries [35]. It is mostly organized within a given group by linking resource conditions, community attributes and institutional arrangements for natural resource management, while its institutions shape how people use natural resources when the use determines the development of the resource, help users make productive management strategies and affect the distribution of benefits from the resource [55, 56]. Moreover, diversified collective actions in natural resource management from different perspectives directly or indirectly contribute to the sustainability of fishery resource management and reduce influence of external factors [34] where actors from different backgrounds, norms, values and understandings organize themselves and share resource use knowledge [57].
The central motivation for collective action in different organizations that organize stakeholders to participate in fishery developments and decision-making is the way the community’s benefit is maximized through identifying threats of mismanagement, livelihood insecurity and poverty [14, 45]. Active participation and cooperation of the government, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), organized groups, and other stakeholders in management decisions build the basis for its development [10]. Promotion of well-organized management by actors of collective action improves the sustainability of common-pool resources like fisheries, which could improve the livelihood and food security of the users [58]. Well-organized stakeholders, through partnerships and supporters of the actors, create value addition, minimize loss, improve quality, adopt technologies, and improve the economic gain of the sector [59].
The government can create a sustainable role for the establishment of collective action with adequate infrastructures and structural change for fishery promotion [60]. Engagement in every individual large-scale collective action problem generates unique stressors for addressing and overcoming the problems that occur [61]. Members working together to produce livelihoods and allocate goods may face common problems like climate change, natural resource depletion, pollution and biodiversity loss, while these problems mostly challenge human life. Compared to other sectors, the role of fishery sector in the overall economy is still irrelevant in Ethiopia. Absence of fully integrated actors’ decisions and efforts in the sector and aquaculture production contributed low to the improvement of food security in Ethiopia [62, 63].
2.3 Challenges of sustainable collective action in fishery resource management
Challenges of collective action result in groups failing to act in their common self-interest while overcoming its problems is always a challenge, but conditions enhance local users' understanding of how their own cooperation can create rules about the availability and scarcity of resources [33, 64]. Difficulty in overcoming these problems results in the degradation or loss of natural resources [65]. Unless supported by institutional law enforcement, resources advancement and resulted in positive outcomes, collective action is not properly used for the management of common pool resources like fisheries, forests and irrigation due to a lack of coordination, conflict between members on expected outcomes, and a lack of strengthened governance, which affects its sustainability. However, if carefully applied, it contributes critical and outstanding importance to economic and environmental sustainability [66]. Besides, collective action in common pool resource management is exposed to the costs of communication and information provision at interaction between actors and the needs of participants of each actor to minimize the effect of climate change and overall sustainable development [67].
Conflict among members of the actors, factions that hinder collective decision and action, the absence of a fair election of leader and abused power, incapacity of the organization, insufficient funds, mistrust among actors, internal conflicts, lack of governmental support, resource unit mobility and corruption are the key threats to the success of fishery development [14, 45]. Conflicts within resource use directly or indirectly affect collective action activities, as they might be the cause of natural resource actions being influenced by social-ecological and governance contexts and conflict in natural resource management institutions. The outcomes of these interactions influence future conflict risk, livelihoods, and resource sustainability [47].
In Ethiopia, collective actions of fishery resource management faces the problems of conflict in between users, mostly those raised from marginalized groups of the resource. It is mostly caused by a lack of governance, institutional failures, social-ecological factors and lack of win–win coordination between the communities. These can result in risks to the livelihood of the community that depends on the fishery, social inequalities, and continuous depletion of the resources. Moreover, strengthening collective action on fishery resources by improving the role of institutions for fishery resource management, organizing the local communities according to their equity over the resource, and enabling users to solve their access conflicts through negotiation will solve challenges to fishery production and management in the country.
Collective actions in fishery resources help all actors in resource use management by providing incentives for the disadvantageous groups from the cooperatives and ensuring the negotiable cooperation of the actors through solving frequent violence between actors over resource access and uses in Ethiopia. However, the backward resource access norms of some local communities and the lack of formal institutions led collective action in fishery management to be exposed to group conflict. The conflict could occur when one group tries to exclude another group of resource access and use. As a result, overexploitation of fish and environmental degradation happen around water bodies. Against these problems, the formulation of formal regulations for fish catchment through the building of strong structures of collective action creates harmonized mutual benefits for the local communities. Further collective action, when supported by organizational and institutional development, could result in the positive impact of a heterogeneous population on fish resource production. Accredited collective action solves the problems of power enactment from other bodies and unidirectional resource protection orders. Such organizations motivate the local communities to be involved in managing, protecting, accessing, utilizing, and adding value to the resource.
2.4 Heterogeneity and institutional management in collective action of fishery resources
The fishery production and management problems are mostly related to the resources’ nature of being open-access and the lack of an effective set of policies for managing, monitoring and controlling overuse of the resources [68]. In developing countries like Ethiopia, underdeveloped fishery regulations and management, a lack of control over access to fish in the water bodies, a lack of markets, and the indirect or direct effect of environmental devastation caused by climate change affected fish production level, productivity and sustainability of its species. Further, literature pointed out the negative impact of heterogeneity of community from the perspectives of social, economic and cultural diversity in the country where the deterioration of renewable natural resources such as fishery resources is common.
The interaction between stakeholders and non-human entities provides the outcome of collective management, which depends on the way social actors socially construct. Successful cooperation in collective action may prevent the likelihood of resource depletion, for example, through more effective resource utilization or collusion against sanctioning and monitoring systems [69]. Institutional arrangements for the use and management of natural resources can be classified as operational rules, collective choice rules and constitutional rules. Institutions play an important role in the protection of natural resources through the implementation of natural resource management policies, which manifest themselves in enforcing the institutions to influence collective actors of the resource [70]. The sustainability of common pool resources and solving its continuous challenges in developing countries like Ethiopia, where poor natural resource management and governance and an unequal legal framework exist, are directly impacted by well-organized collective action for achieving diversified overall economic well-being [9, 37]. If no rules and regulations are imposed on fishery extraction from water bodies, the expected benefits, such as environmental, livelihood and food security, will be reduced. To minimize these negative influences, effective fishery governance and strengthening resource-based institutions at the community level through organizing communities to collectively engage in fishery management are immediate actions [17].
2.5 Policy options of collective fishery management
Concerning the collective management of natural resources, researches and investigations have been undertaken, especially given the fact that management of these resources is difficult due to its characteristics like excludability and sub-tractability, which creates rivalry between different users. Policymakers use collective action to resolve the conflict between resource conservation and growing resources, which can be observed in policies addressing resource problems [71]. They use collective management to create interaction between stakeholders and nonhuman entities, which provides for the outcome of collective management, and depends on the way social actors socially construct. This successful cooperation of collective action helps decision-makers to forward policies preventing the likelihood of resource depletion through effective resource utilization or collusion against sanctioning and monitoring systems.
Collective action among resource users has long been identified as a basic element of successful resource governance, and one of the main concerns of resource research is the identification of factors that affect the action. So, policymakers use it to identify determinant factors of collective action like trust, social capital, common preferences, shared knowledge, collaborative experiences, focusing events and expectations of future interactions. They also use collective action to give attention to depleted resources by providing resource property rights when state governance becomes inadequate and unable to counter the depletion of natural resources. But, failure to realize collective action challenges in sustaining natural resources requires devising governance arrangements that are supportive of the diverse needs of heterogeneous users and protect the long-term productive capacity of these resources [72]. Fishery development and utilization proclamations and monitoring policies applied to reduce illegal fishing activities in Ethiopia. But the implementation and success of the proclamation are poor due to different challenges like larger number of jobless found around the lakes and seeks job and employ themselves in catchment of fish [73].
3 Results and discussion
3.1 Overall findings of the review
The results of this review paper, entitled “Collective Action in Fishery Resource Management and its Challenges in Ethiopia” are organized to different parts and discussed it in different categories. These categories include Ethiopia’s fishery production management and its challenges, potential problems in fishery production, role of its collective active action and its intervening policies.
In Ethiopia, the presence of different water bodies is serving as an opportunity for fishery production. Fishery is important in serving as a source of food, creating job opportunities, and improving the livelihood of the communities in the country. It has a crucial importance in interfering with the food insecurity problems of society. In the country, though fish consumption levels are low, the consumption behavior of society has increased more than before. Currently, in Ethiopia, the most influential challenges in fishery management are the increased unemployment rate and environmental degradation. These issues forced society to rely on fish caught from water bodies with no intention of caring for the environment. An increased population number needed to fulfill their needs, which increased the domestic demand for fish consumption. However, the lack of a management system for adding value to the fishery resources and effectively banning overexploitation of fish resources from water bodies had negative consequences for the sustainability of fish diversity in the country.
Organizing collective actions in fishery management needs the establishment of strong institutions, support from local communities, and central governance. However, collective action problems in fishery management in Ethiopia are caused by a lack of collective work for the sustainability of the resource. The interest of the community and the shortage of the resource also created conflict over access to the resource and lack of responsibility for protecting the resource. These issues had arisen due to lack of central management system. Collective action members fail to abide to improve the production, conserve it from loss, and share the benefits based on equitable methods. Lack of households’ interest in protecting other natural resources such as forests, soil, grazing land and minerals also directly or indirectly affected the role of collective action in protecting fishery resources in the country.
The impacts of cultural, social, economic and environmental challenges are also other challenges for the successfulness of collective action in fishery management in Ethiopia. At this time, for example, it has become very difficult to organize a community to be organized collectively, engage them in fish resource protection, production, marketing, and value addition, and deliver it to the consumers as they are being displaced due to domestic political crises, conflict and war. Further, fish protection, production, gear to extract and add value requires technologies for production improvements. However, the societies are unable to afford the cost of these technologies and are faced with a lack of fishing equipment and poor infrastructure. These issues resulted in traditional, underutilized, low production, traditional trapping and post-harvest loss of fishery resources in the country.
Damages to water bodies by weeds, climatic change, expansion of agricultural production through deforestation, using water for irrigation, illegal fishing, and overfishing are also significant contributors to the inactivity of collective action in fishery resources in the country. Invasion of water bodies by weeds is the most influential challenge in fish production and has caused a decline in fish stock, a high cost of getting fish, and banned the overall involvement of the community in fishing. Besides, supportive services from local organizations, governments, and NGO’s in strengthening the role of collective action for sustaining fish production are miserable in Ethiopia. Overall, lack of management services from all these stakeholders resulted in low fishing productivity, raised the number of illegal fishing gear, poor regulations for sustaining fish species and underutilizing of fish production and consumption.
3.2 Fishery production management in Ethiopia
In Ethiopia, the management of fishery production needs effective setup management, regular stakeholder follow-up, and the creation of methods for encouraging the development of aquaculture while mesh size regulation, closing season and ground, fishery regulatory systems and coordinating local communities used for fishery production, but it is undertaken in traditional control approach methods. Lack of markets for fishery products, time of catching fish, lack of gear restrictions, regulation, training for fishers, and monitoring fishery production are the key challenges to fishery production in Ethiopia. These factors resulted in and confirmed that fishery production management is very poor in Ethiopia. [73,74,75,76,77] discussed the importance of proper management of fishery resources in Ethiopia.
Proper management of fishery production plays a great role in employment, income, and reducing overexploitation of fisheries, thereby improving the economy of Ethiopia as a whole and the livelihood of individuals who depend on it. However, management of fishery production problems, such as poor controlling and managing of ponds or lakes and pollution created by individual care, are complex challenges that exist in the country. As a result, problems found within water bodies are caused by human activities directly or indirectly affecting fishery production. In line with these, the empirical researches of different authors [75, 78,79,80,81] discussed that investing in water bodies like lakes and paying attention to their protection could result in sustained fishery production in Ethiopia. Overall, fishery resources in Ethiopia lack co-management practices for conserving and rehabilitating fisheries, management of use restrictions, difficulty in maintaining different fish species and traditional and backward production system. These issues are affecting fish production, utilization and sustainability. [82, 83] also forwarded that the cooperation of actors engaged in conservation, rehabilitation, and utilization through organizing inputs used increases the overall benefits of fishery production.
3.3 Fishery production and management challenges in Ethiopia
Though Ethiopia has great potential for aquaculture, its fishery production is being challenged by many factors, like the absence of aquaculture technologies and the shortage of sustainable-quality fish seeds and feed supplies. In addition to these, lack of stringent sanitary and phytosanitary standards for ensuring good quality products, lack of fishing gear, socio-economic factors, land use factors, lack of administration setup data, poison plants, wetland degradation, fish diseases, water hyacinth as it has a serious impact on fishing, immature fishing and overfishing of valuable fish species in some lakes are other fish production challenges caused by a lack of management in Ethiopia. These results showed that advantages that should be obtained and generated from fishery production in least-developed countries, specifically Ethiopia, are found to be underdeveloped and unexploited due to complex challenges and constraints that impede the sector from being well produced and managed. Different authors [15, 54, 76, 77, 82, 84, 85] also discussed fishery production and management challenges. In Ethiopia, the government’s lack of concern for supporting material and technical services and fishery users’ conflict resolution, inappropriate policies and weak institutional arrangements for the fishery sector caused low fish supply. Lack of awareness, lack of supporting and subsidizing the sector, inadequate technical and material backup, and low profit brought fishery production and management challenges in Ethiopia. And also, the management activities of fishery collection are exposed to different problems of poor implementation of policies, regulations, coordination, management of the resources, irresponsible fishing activities and stakeholders, lack of training, fishing facilities and infrastructures. It is supported by [86, 87].
Post-harvest loss management is a crucial issue while fishery sector harvest is raised in Ethiopia, as fish is susceptible to loss due to spoilage, breakage, size, lack of motorized boats, retarded growth of fish, discarding of by-catches and operational losses. In line with these, a lack of collective awareness among relevant stakeholders and entities about threats to fishery production affects the benefits obtained by users from resource production. The findings of [13, 88,89,90,91,92,93] discussed the aforementioned post-harvest losses of fishery production and management challenges in Ethiopia.
3.4 Over-exploitation and degradation of water bodies and fishery resources in Ethiopia
Natural resources in Ethiopia have been exposed to overexploitation for a long time. Less consideration for natural resources, which contribute beneficial environmental services to human well-being by delivering them, led the resources’ sustainability value to be under heavy pressure. Degraded resources bring climate change, extremely overfished stocks, exploited fish, and the collapse of fish resources. Overexploitation of fish in Ethiopia was mostly caused by the use of fishing nets that do not meet national legal standards; the absence of laws or the failure to enforce these to preserve lakes and fish resources, siltation and unwise exploitation of them creates conflict between users. The daily activities of human beings that discharge hazardous contaminants like microplastics and macroplastics to different water bodies in Ethiopia pollute the environment and seriously degrade natural resources like fish. And also, various land‐ and water‐use activities by humans degrade and impact the quantity and quality of lake water and the fishery resource in water bodies is significantly affected due to excessive abstraction of water for irrigation, land degradation and deforestation. These issues were also discussed by [94,95,96,97,98,99,100,101].
Lakes in Ethiopia are sources of fish but highly degraded, mainly due to a lack of sense of ownership, poor policy implementation, and uncoordinated activities. Human pressures such as water withdrawal and land use change shrink lakes and decline the quality of water, which directly or indirectly affect the lives of fish in water bodies. Deforestation in the fish catchment also caused silt deposits from erosion, soil erosion and land erosion and increased the turbidity of the lake water, which suspects the sustainability of natural resources, including fish. Fish stock decline in Ethiopia is caused by the above-mentioned problems and other factors like excessive fishing effort well beyond the stock potential, destructive fishing gears and methods, small-sized mesh that captures immature fish, weak management and extension systems The result is supported by [74, 102,103,104]
3.5 Collective action in fishery resource management and its challenges in Ethiopia
Natural resources provide direct uses, aesthetic pleasure, and help as input but their degradation affects the livelihood of those who depend on it but in order to sustain the services of the sector, the role the collectives is not underestimated. Poor links between natural resource property right, conservation and management and their collective action through providing proper policy and technology adoption resulted in less improvement in food security, economic growth, poverty reduction and environmental sustainability. Collective market development, the government of fishery, collective incentive establishment through improving management and providing economic incentives are also depressed and caused the potential impacts of climate change on fisheries resources in Ethiopia. Collective action problems of fishery management and natural resource property rights were discussed by [49, 56, 105, 106].
The source of fisheries in Ethiopia is exclusively inland water bodies, where different groups of stakeholders engaged in fishery production. Groups commonly involved in catching fish from lakes lack the ability to achieve a common goal as they could have different interests, heterogeneous understanding and skills, mistrust each other, lack management and law enforcement, lack general awareness and scientific information about protecting both water and fisheries [75, 77]. The most significant problems observed along the fish collective challenges in Ethiopia are a lack of collaboration of government and stakeholders as different water bodies are used openly by the societies around the water, which need government intervention to regulate appropriate policies and strategies for strengthening the collective actors’ cooperation. But the current fish collectives’ activities in Ethiopia are challenged due to inefficient fishing gear, poor post-harvest handling, low prices, and a lack of markets, causing under-performances in fish production [107]. [108] also discussed that less cooperation from different fishery stakeholders like the government, research centers and non-governmental organizations resulted in low sustainability of fishery production management in Ethiopia.
Ethiopia is endowed with enormous freshwater resources like lakes, rivers and streams, offering rich fishing opportunities for fishermen. But policies are weak to effectively exploit, develop, conserve and utilize these enormous fishery resources, which indicate the fishery resources in the country remain exemplary for backward fish production and a less coordinated collective that is not well organized and generates expected income from the sector. [78] discussed collectives’ contribution to creating and enforcing awareness through formulating and enacting policies for actors like fishermen, local communities, government bodies and others by monitoring and evaluating the daily activities undertaken around lakes.
Moreover, in the country, applying collective action in fishery management is being challenged by a lack of commitment to protecting environmental degradations. These issues are caused by pollution of water bodies, the absence of strengthened collectively organizing local communities and empowering them, poor policy legislation for regulating the use and access of resources through limiting fishing, and a lack of awareness-creating training. The difference in perception of collective members in fishery management, its expected incentive return, communities economic and power variations, characteristics of fishery users, and their behavioral relationship with the fishery are immediate causes for the difficulty of organizing communities to engage in fishery collective action in the country. Another important issue is the unfair balance between what users contribute and what gets shared, which creates competition between each actor and leads to conflict, thereby weakens the association of collective action. Weak relationships between the users of fisheries and other livestock-based organizations, their inability to make collective decisions, and shift to development organizations are another problem of collective action in fishery management that has affected its success in Ethiopia.
4 Conclusion and suggestions
Ethiopia is a country with good climatic conditions, various ecological variations and topologies, and endowed substantial water bodies and diversified wetlands such as rivers, lakes, marshes, natural or artificial ponds (reservoirs), floodplains, and swamps. These resources are serving as habitat for different species of fish and have created sustained opportunities for the production of fisheries, which is a promise for the sustainability of the fisheries sector. However, management of fishery resources through collective action is backward and didn’t bring the expected outcome. The problems are caused by a lack of coordination between fish users and other supportive agencies, as well as internal and external factors mostly caused by economic, social, political and technological factors. Absence of concrete management in formulating rules and regulations and biophysical variations within the community also consequently affected the organization of local communities in collective action and their engagement in tangible and practical activities for fishery management in Ethiopia. Fish exploitation, methods and time of fishing, water pollution, and environmental pollution are important challenges of fish production in the country.
The problems associated with natural resources like fisheries become big when we fail to undertake collective action and overcome collective action problems found within the resources. These mainly affect the poor farmers who depend on the fishery sector for their lives and need protection from the government, NGO’s, religious leaders and cooperated individuals when they become together in order to save the resource from damage and expect a jointly desired outcome from the resources. In order to realize it, collective action plays an important role. The way actors in collective action organize and how they work together in the fishery sector through contributing efforts and expecting desired outcomes can determine the sustainability of the resources. When collective action in fishery resources is handled properly, the resources cannot be exposed to exploitation, and all the users of the resources can be beneficiaries, which can be achieved through reducing conflicts in using the resources, solving the problems in collective action; especially on the expected benefit/outcome from the resources, properly managing the actors in collective actions, and working with institutions who can contribute to the management of fishery resources. Actors in collective action may come from different areas, such as the level of living standard, religion, politics, cultures, knowledge, and norms, and as they manage their differences, the protection of the resource can be strengthened. Additionally, leaders in collective action initiate the cooperation of the members and enable them to intend for the desired future outcome of the resources.
The efforts of all stakeholders in protecting and adding value to the environment will contribute to the protection fishery resources, increase their production, and help to sustain their sustainability. The lives and production of fish resources depend on water bodies and expansion of aquacultures in Ethiopia also changes the current fish production challenges and helps in keeping fish species, increasing their production, and providing the expected returns. Moreover, fish resources are considered open-access resources, and everybody tries to get access to fish resources, which creates overexploitation of the resource. So, the critical policy implications of this review study are that organizing the local community in collective action through providing them reasonable services and involving them in the fishery sector to control fish catchment will minimize the current loss in fishery sector. Improving the joint collaboration between fish users, local communities, government institutions and development agents also helps to ensure the sustainable protection and production of fish and achieve the continuity and sustainability of the resources for the future in Ethiopia.
Data availability
Not applicable.
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Zenbaba, O.S. Collective action in fishery resource management and its challenges in Ethiopia: a review. Discov Food 4, 42 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s44187-024-00123-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s44187-024-00123-6